مدیریت ریسک شرکت و تئوری سیگنالینگ تقسیم سود

This article investigates the effect of corporate risk management on dividend policy. We extend the signaling framework of Bhattacharya [1979. Bell Journal of Economics 10, 259–270] by including the possibility of hedging the future cash flow. We find that the higher the hedging level, the lower the incremental dividend. This result is intuitive. It is in line with studies suggesting that cash flows’ predictability decreases the marginal gain from costly signaling through dividends and the assertion that corporate hedging decreases cash flow volatility. It is also in line with the purported positive relation between information asymmetry and dividend policy (e.g., Miller and Rock [1985. The Journal of Finance 40, 1031–1051]) and the assertion that risk management alleviates the information asymmetry problem (e.g., DaDalt et al. [2002. The Journal of Future Markets 22, 261–267]). Our theoretical model has testable implications.

Signaling theory states that changes in dividend policy convey information about changes in future cash flows (e.g., Bhattacharya, 1979 and Miller and Rock, 1985). Dividend signaling suggests a positive relation between information asymmetry and dividend policy.1 The higher the asymmetric information level, the higher the sensitivity of the dividend to future prospects of the firm. Several empirical studies attempt to test the informational content of dividend changes, yet they disagree about the sign and the significance of the effect of information asymmetry on dividend policy (see Allen and Michaely (2003), for a survey). Another strand of literature suggests that corporate risk management alleviates information asymmetry problems and hence positively affects firm value. Information asymmetry between managers and outside investors is one of the key market imperfections that make hedging potentially beneficial. Breeden and Viswanathan, 1998 and DeMarzo and Duffie, 1995 argue that hedging reduces noise around earnings streams and thus decreases the level of asymmetric information regarding firm value. DaDalt et al. (2002) provide empirical evidence supporting these theoretical studies. In this article we exploit the interaction between the level of information asymmetry and the dividend policy, along with its interaction with corporate risk management. We argue that risk management alleviates the asymmetric information problem, which is a main determinant of dividend policy. Though many studies that examine dividend policy determinants include several measures of information asymmetry, none, to our knowledge, consider hedging among these measures. Extending the signaling framework of Bhattacharya (1979), we provide theoretical support for the effect of corporate risk management on dividend payout policy. We find a negative relation between the hedge ratio and the incremental dividend payout. The remainder of the article is organized as follows. In Section 2 we present the theoretical model and its implications. Section 3 concludes the paper.

The findings of this article reconcile dividend signaling theory with risk management theory. We contribute to the dividend signaling literature by emphasizing the interaction between corporate risk management policy and dividend policy. The interaction between these two corporate policies has received little attention in the literature despite their common link to information asymmetry. Using an extension of Bhattacharya’s signaling model, we find that the hedging of future cash flows reduces the sensitivity of dividends to future earnings. A straightforward implication of this result is that the informational content of dividend changes decreases with the hedge ratio. It leads to the empirical test of whether corporate risk management reduces the power of dividend changes to predict future changes in earnings. It thus proposes a new test of the dividend signaling theory. In this article we have restricted our attention to linear hedging strategies (i.e., forwards or futures sales or purchases), for two reasons. First, for these financial products, the firm’s hedging strategy can be expressed in closed form. Second, the widespread use of linear hedging instruments is reported by several survey studies.8 Alternative, nonlinear hedging strategies that involve instruments such as options could be considered in future works to make the results of this article more general.